Food Summit Sham - International Imperialism

The behaviour of traditional American lackeys is also very revealing. Most of us are familiar with the statement made by former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard; “America has no better friend than Australia!” The comment is interesting for a number of reasons, not least being its obvious inaccuracy. Most Australians have links with Europe, Ireland, the UK and Asia; very few Australians have connections with the USA! The former PM was actually affirming his government’s commitment to enter into a slavish relationship with America, a situation that appalled the majority of Australians.

The current Oz government is led by a groomed and approved for the job, Murdoch selectee by the name of Kevin Rudd. We should never forget the lunch in New York! Murdoch’s influential comment after that meeting -- that Kevin Rudd would make a good Prime Minister -- assured Rudd of victory. Murdoch’s formidable media interests rallied behind Rudd and the rest is history.

In a context where the Australian people booted Howard into the political wilderness for his shameless, servile behaviour, the current PM, Kevin Rudd, must not appear to overtly toe the American line but his foreign minister, Stephen Smith, gives the game away!

Smith’s belittling pledge of faithfulness to Condoleezza Rice at a press conference in Washington revealed the true relationship of the Rudd government to America. Soon after Smith’s disgusting performance in Washington, all doubts of continuing servility were removed when Smith acquiesced to American demands and rushed to recognise the illegal secession of Kosovo, a state that has absolutely no relevance to Australia!

We are therefore assured of Smith reflecting American policy wherever he goes. His latest comments at the food summit regarding Mugabe are no surprise; media attention was easily drawn to the two controversial characters/leaders -- the media is also a predicable beast and is easily manipulated, notwithstanding editorial control from owners like Murdoch. [In the same manner the American people were led to believe that war was justified and that Iraq was in possession of WMD, a flagrant lie orchestrated by neo-conservative strategists.]

The question is why would anyone be interested in diverting attention away from the food crisis? Responsibility is the answer in a word.

Consider the nations responsible for plantation farming, mono-culture etc., all at the expense of local food production and the traditional use of land. Sugar, rubber, coffee, tea, palm oil, cotton and a host of other plantation crops have all displaced food crops in developing nations.

Multinational companies were able to profit from third world exports and imports of wheat, maize and other staples to the third world, a very profitable arrangement. However, the energy crisis and demand for meat protein have increased the price of some crops to the extent where commercial growers are now dedicating huge swathes of land to ethanol production and soy bean (animal food) production. The result is considerably less food staples for export to developing nations.

Multinationals are acutely aware of their image and do not wish to take responsibility for the human suffering their actions create. Their interests in commodity and futures markets always take precedence over the needs of starving humanity.

Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains.

Whether in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, the story has been the same: the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside followed by the massive influx of subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural imports after the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture pried open markets. .

African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base.

From Exporter to Importer

At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa.

Agriculture is in deep crisis, and the causes are many, including civil wars and the spread of HIV-AIDS. However, a very important part of the explanation was the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the structural adjustment programs to which most African countries were subjected as the price for getting IMF and World Bank assistance to service their external debt.

Instead of triggering a virtuous spiral of growth and prosperity, structural adjustment saddled Africa with low investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption, and low output, all combining to create a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline.

Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced applications, lower yields, and lower investment. One would have expected the non-economist to predict this outcome, which was screened out by the Bank and Fund’s free-market paradigm. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that the withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market and private sector to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector believed that reducing state expenditures created more risk and failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the predictions of neoliberal doctrine yielded precisely the opposite: the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. In those instances where private traders did come in to replace the state, an Oxfam report noted, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable aid flows.” The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that “many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists.”

What support the government was allowed to muster was channeled by the Bank to export agriculture – to generate the foreign exchange earnings that the state needed to service its debt to the Bank and the Fund. But, as in Ethiopia during the famine of the early 1980s, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into more and more unsuitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the Bank’s encouraging several economies undergoing adjustment to focus on export production of the same crops simultaneously often led to overproduction that then triggered a price collapse in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s program to expand cocoa production triggered a 48% drop in the international price of cocoa between 1986 and 1989, threatening, as one account put it, “to increase the vulnerability of the entire economy to the vagaries of the cocoa market.” 1 In 2002-2003, a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in many other regions, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Latin America and Asia, the Bank and Fund confined themselves for the most part to macromanagement, or supervising the dismantling of the state’s economic role from above. These institutions left the dirty details of implementation to the state bureaucracies. In Africa, where they dealt with much weaker governments, the Bank and Fund micromanaged such decisions as how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired, or even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom. In other words, Bank and IMF resident proconsuls reached into the very innards of the state’s involvement in the agricultural economy to rip it up.

The Role of Trade

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair trade practices on the part of the EU and the United States. Trade liberalization allowed low-priced subsidized EU beef to enter and drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, U.S. cotton growers offloaded their cotton on world markets at 20-55% of the cost of production, bankrupting West African and Central African cotton farmers in the process.2

These dismal outcomes were not accidental. As then-U.S. Agriculture Secretary John Block put it at the start of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1986, “the idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agricultural products, which are available, in most cases at lower cost.”3

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of U.S. products stemmed from subsidies that were becoming more massive each year, despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase out all forms of subsidy. From $367 billion in 1995, the first year of the WTO, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Subsidies now account for 40% of the value of agricultural production in the European Union (EU) and 25% in the United States.

The social consequences of structural adjustment cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”4

That was, however, a rare moment of candor. What was especially disturbing was that, as Oxford University political economist Ngaire Woods pointed out, the “seeming blindness of the Fund and Bank to the failure of their approach to sub-Saharan Africa persisted even as the studies of the IMF and the World Bank themselves failed to elicit positive investment effects.”5

The Case of Malawi

This stubbornness led to tragedy in Malawi.

It was a tragedy preceded by success. In 1998 and 1999, the government initiated a program to give each smallholder family a “starter pack” of free fertilizers and seeds. This followed several years of successful experimentation in which the packs were provided only to the poorest families. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after, however, is a story that will be enshrined as a classic case study in a future book on the 10 greatest blunders of neoliberal economics.

The World Bank and other aid donors forced the drastic scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, food output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its strategic grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the crisis in food production turned into a famine in 2001-2002, there were hardly any reserves left to rush to the countryside. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF, however, was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program with the government on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets…crowd out more productive spending.”

When an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government finally had enough of the Bank and IMF’s institutionalized stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy program, enabling two million households to buy fertilizer at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The results: bumper harvests for two years in a row, a surplus of one million tons of maize, and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to other countries in Southern Africa.

But the World Bank, like its sister agency, still stubbornly clung to the discredited doctrine. As the Bank’s country director told the Toronto Globe and Mail, “All those farmers who begged, borrowed, and stole to buy extra fertilizer last year are now looking at that decision and rethinking it. The lower the maize price, the better for food security but worse for market development.”

Fleeing Failure

Malawi’s defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today. Owing to the absence of any clear case of success, structural adjustment has been widely discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments that once subscribed to it have distanced themselves from the Bank, the most prominent case being the official British aid agency that co-funded the latest subsidized fertilizer program in Malawi. Perhaps the motivation of these institutions is to prevent the further erosion of their diminishing influence in the continent through association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions. At the same time, they are certainly aware that Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to the conditionalities of the World Bank, IMF, and Western government aid programs.

Beyond Africa, even former supporters of adjustment, like the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington and the rabidly neoliberal Economist acknowledged that the state’s abdication from agriculture was a mistake. In a recent commentary on the rise of food prices, for instance, IFPRI asserted that “rural investments have been sorely neglected in recent decades,” and says that it is time for “developing country governments [to] increase their medium- and long-term investments in agricultural research and extension, rural infrastructure, and market access for small farmers.” At the same time, the Bank and IMF’s espousal of free trade came under attack from the heart of the economics establishment itself, with a panel of luminaries headed by Princeton’s Angus Deaton accusing the Bank’s research department of being biased and “selective” in its research and presentation of data. As the old saying goes, success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan.

Unable to deny the obvious, the Bank has finally acknowledged that the whole structural adjustment enterprise was a mistake, though it smuggled this concession into the middle of the 2008 World Development Report, perhaps in the hope that it would not attract too much attention. Nevertheless, it was a damning admission:

The sugar coated bullets of the "free market" are killing our children. The act to kill is unpremeditated. It is instrumented in a detached fashion through computer program trading on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges, where the global prices of rice, wheat and corn are decided upon.

We are at the crossroads of the most serious economic and social crisis in modern history. The process of global impoverishment unleashed at the outset of the 1980s debt crisis, has reached a major turning point, leading to the simultaneous outbreak of famines in all major regions of the developing World.

There are many complex features underlying the global economic crisis pertaining to financial markets, the decline in production, the collapse of State institutions and the rapid development of a profit-driven war economy. What is rarely mentioned in this analysis, is how this global economic restructuring forcibly impinges on three fundamental necessities of life: food, water and fuel.

The provision of food, water and fuel is a precondition of civilized society: they are necessary factors for the survival of the human species. In recent years, the prices of these three variables has increased dramatically at the global level, with devastating economic and social consequences.

These three essential goods or commodities, which in a real sense determine the reproduction of economic and social life on planet earth, are under the control of a small number of global corporations and financial institutions.

Both the State as well as the gamut of international organizations --often referred to as the "international community"-- serve the unfettered interests of global capitalism. The main intergovernmental bodies including the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organizations (WTO) have endorsed the New World Order on behalf of their corporate sponsors. Governments in both developed and developing countries have abandoned their historical role of regulating key economic variables as well as ensuring a minimum livelihood for their people.

Protest movements directed against the hikes in the prices of food and gasoline have erupted simultaneously in different regions of the World. The conditions are particularly critical in Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, India, Bangladesh. Spiraling food and fuel prices in Somalia have precipitated the entire country in a situation of mass starvation, coupled with severe water shortages. A similar and equally serious situation prevails in Ethiopia.

Other countries affected by spiraling food prices include Indonesia, the Philippines, Liberia, Egypt, Sudan, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Eritrea, a long list of impoverished countries..., not to mention those under foreign military occupation including Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

Deregulation

The provision of food, water and fuel are no longer the object of governmental or intergovernmental regulation or intervention, with a view to alleviating poverty or averting the outbreak of famines.

The fate of millions of human beings is managed behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms as part of a profit driven agenda.

And because these powerful economic actors operate through a seemingly neutral and "invisible" market mechanism, the devastating social impacts of engineered hikes in the prices of food, fuel and water are casually dismissed as the result of supply and demand considerations.

Nature of the Global Economic and Social Crisis

Largely obfuscated by official and media reports, both the " food crisis" and the " oil crisis" are the result of the speculative manipulation of market values by powerful economic actors.

We are not dealing with distinct and separate food, fuel and water "crises" but with a global process of economic and social restructuring.

The dramatic price hikes of these three essential commodities is not haphazard. All three variables, including the prices of basic food staples, water for production and consumption and fuel are the object of a process of deliberate and simultaneous market manipulation.

At the heart of the food crisis is the rising price of food staples coupled with a dramatic increase in the price of fuel.

Concurrently, the price of water which is an essential input into agricultural and industrial production, social infrastructure, public sanitation and household consumption has increased abruptly as a result of a Worldwide movement to privatize water resources.

We are dealing with a major economic and social upheaval, an unprecedented global crisis, characterized by the triangular relationship between water, food and fuel: three fundamental variables, which together affect the very means of human survival.

In very concrete terms, these price hikes impoverish and destroy peoples lives. Moreover, the Worldwide collapse in living standards is occurring at a time of war. It is intimately related to the military agenda. The war in the Middle East bears a direct relationship to the control over oil and water reserves.

While water is not at present an internationally trade commodity in the same way as oil and food staples, it is also the object of market manipulation through the privatization of water.

The economic and financial actors operating behind closed doors, are:

- The major Wall Street banks and financial houses, including the institutional speculators which play a direct role in commodity markets including the oil and food markets

- The Anglo-American oil giants,

- The biotech-agribusiness conglomerates, which own the intellectual property rights on seeds and farm inputs. The biotech companies are also major actors on the NY and Chicago mercantile exchanges.

- The water giants including Suez, Veolia and Bechtel-United Utilities, involved in the extensive privatization of the World's water resources.

- The Anglo-American military-industrial complex which includes the big five US defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grunman, Boeing and General Dynamics) in alliance with British Aerospace Systems Corporation (BAES) constitutes a powerful overlapping force, closely aligned with Wall Street, the oil giants and the agribusiness-biotech conglomerates.

The Oil Price Bubble

The movement in global prices on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges bears no relationship to the cost of the production. The cost of Middle East oil is of the order of $15 a barrel, the cost of oil in the Alberta tar sands is of the order of $30 a barrel. (Antoine Ayoub, Radio Canada, May 2008)

The price of crude oil is currently in excess of $120 a barrel. This market price is largely the result of the speculative onslaught.

Fuel enters into the production of virtually all areas of manufacturing, agriculture and the services economy. The hikes in fuel prices have contributed, in all major regions of the World, to precipitating tens of thousands of small and medium sized businesses into bankruptcy as well as undermining and potentially paralyzing the channels of domestic and international trade.

The increased cost of gasoline at the retail level is leading to the demise of local level economies, increased industrial concentration and a massive centralization of economic power in the hands of a small number of global corporations. In turn, the hikes in fuel backlash on the urban transit system, schools and hospitals, the trucking industry, intercontinental shipping, airline transportation, tourism, recreation and most public services.

Inflation

The rise in fuel prices unleashes a broader inflationary process which results in a compression of real purchasing power and a consequent Worldwide decline in consumer demand. All major sectors of society, including the middle classes in the developed countries are affected.

These price movements are dictated by the commodity markets. They are the result of speculative trade in index funds, futures and options on major commodity markets including the London ICE, the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges.

The dramatic price hikes are not the result of a shortage of fuel, food or water.

This upheaval in the global economy is deliberate. The State's economic and financial policies are controlled by private corporate interests. Speculative trade is not the object of regulatory policies. The economic depression contributes to wealth formation, to enhancing the power of a handful of global corporations

According to William Engdahl;

"... At least 60% of the 128 per barrel price of crude oil comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York NYMEX futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or Over-The-Counter trading to avoid scrutiny. US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex, by having to pay only 6% of the value of the contract. At today's price of $128 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120. This extreme 'leverage' of 16 to 1 helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population. (See More on the real reason behind high oil prices, Global Research, May 2008)

The dramatic price hikes bears no relationship to the costs of producing oil. The spiraling price of crude oil is not the result of a shortage of oil. It is estimated that the cost of a barrel of oil in the Middle East does not exceed 15 dollars. The costs of a barrel of oil extracted from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, is of the order of $30 (Antoine Ayoub, Radio Canada, May 2008)

Spiraling Food Prices

The global food crisis, characterized by major hikes in the prices of basic food staples, has spearheaded millions of people around the World into starvation and chronic deprivation.

According to the FAO, the price of grain staples has increased by 88% since March 2007. The price of wheat has increased by 181% over a three year period. The price of rice has increased by 50% over the last three months (See Ian Angus, Food Crisis: "The greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model", Global Research, April 2008):

The price of rice has tripled over a five year period, from approximately 600$ a ton in 2003 to more than 1800$ a ton in May 2008. (see chart below)

"The most popular grade of Thailand rice sold for $198 a ton, five years ago and $323 a ton a year ago. In April 2008, the price hit $1,000. Increases are even greater on local markets — in Haiti, the market price of a 50 kilo bag of rice doubled in one week at the end of March 2008. These increases are catastrophic for the 2.6 billion people around the world who live on less than US$2 a day and spend 60% to 80% of their incomes on food. Hundreds of millions cannot afford to eat" (Ibid)

Background of Agricultural Reform

There is a long term historical process of macroeconomic policy reform and global economic restructuring which has contributed to undermining local agriculture. Over the last 25 years, food farming in developing countries has been destabilized and destroyed by the imposition of IMF-World Bank reforms.

Commodity dumping of grain surpluses from the US, Canada and the European Union has led to the demise of food self-sufficiency and the destruction of the local peasant economy. In turn, this process has resulted in multibillion dollar profits for Western agribusiness, resulting from import contracts by developing countries, which are no longer able to produce their own food.

These preexisting historical conditions of mass poverty have been exacerbated and aggravated by the recent surge in grain prices, which have led in some cases to the doubling of the retail price of food staples.

The price hikes has also been exacerbated by the use of corn to produce ethanol. In 2007, global production of corn was of the order of 12.32 billion bushels of which 3.2 billion were used for ethanol production. Almost 40 percent of corn production in the US will be channeled towards ethanol

Genetically Modified Seeds

Coinciding with the establishment the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, another important historical change has occurred in the structure of global agriculture.

Under the articles of agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO)), the food giants have been granted unrestricted freedom to enter the seeds' markets of developing countries.

The acquisition of exclusive "intellectual property rights" over plant varieties by international agro-industrial interests, also favors the destruction of bio-diversity.

Acting on behalf of a handful of biotech conglomerates, GMO seeds have been imposed on farmers, often in the context of "food aid programs". In Ethiopia, for instance, kits of GMO seeds were handed out to impoverished farmers with a view to rehabilitating agricultural production in the wake of a major drought.

The GMO seeds were planted, yielding a harvest. But then the farmer came to realize that the GMO seeds could not be replanted without paying royalties to Monsanto, Arch Daniel Midland et al.

Then, the farmers discovered that the seeds would harvest only if they used the farm inputs including the fertilizer, insecticide and herbicide, produced and distributed by the biotech agribusiness companies. Entire peasant economies were locked into the grip of the agribusiness conglomerates.

Breaking The Agricultural Cycle

With the widespread adoption of GMO seeds, a major transition has occurred in the structure and history of settled agriculture since its inception 10,000 years ago.

The reproduction of seeds at the village level in local nurseries has been disrupted by the use of genetically modified seeds. The agricultural cycle, which enables farmers to store their organic seeds and plant them to reap the next harvest has been broken. This destructive pattern – invariably resulting in famine – is replicated in country after country leading to the Worldwide demise of the peasant economy.

The FAO- World Bank Consensus

At the June 2008 FAO Rome Summit on the food crisis, politicians and economic analysts alike embraced the free market consensus: the outbreak of famines was presented as a result of the usual supply, demand and climatic considerations, beyond the control of policy-makers. The answer: channel emergency relief to affected areas under the auspices World Food Program (WFP)

Ironically, these " expert opinions" are refuted by the data on global grain production: the FAO forecasts for world cereal production point to a record output in 2008.

Contradicting their own textbook explanations, World prices are, according to the World Bank, expected to remain high, despite the increased supply of food staples.

State regulation of the prices of food staples is not considered an option in the corridors of the FAO and the World Bank. And of course that is what is taught in the economics departments of America's most prestigious universities.

Meanwhile, local level farmgate prices barely cover production costs, spearheading the peasant economy into bankruptcy.

The Privatization of Water

According to UN sources, which vastly underestimate the seriousness of the water crisis, one billion people worldwide (15% of the World population) have no access to clean water "and 6,000 children die every day because of infections linked to unclean water" (BBC News, 24 March 2004)

A handful of global corporations including Suez, Veolia, Bechtel-United Utilities, Thames Water and Germany's RWE-AG are acquiring control and ownership over public water utilities and waste management. Suez and Veolia hold about 70 percent of the privatized water systems Worldwide.

The privatization of water under World Bank auspices feeds on the collapse of the system of public distribution of safe tap drinking water: "The World Bank serves the interests of water companies both through its regular loan programs to governments, which often come with conditions that explicitly require the privatization of water provision..." (Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Water Privatization: The World Bank's Latest Market Fantasy, Polaris Institute, Ottawa, 2004))

"The modus operandi [in India] is clear -- neglect development of water resources [under World Bank budget austerity measures], claim a "resource crunch" and allow existing systems to deteriorate." (Ann Ninan, Private Water, Public Misery, India Resource Center April 16, 2003)

Meanwhile, the markets for bottled water have been appropriated by a handful of corporations including Coca-Cola, Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo. These companies not only work hand in glove with the water utility companies, they are linked up to the agribusiness-biotech companies involved in the food industry. Tap water is purchased by Coca-Cola from a municipal water facility and then resold on a retail basis. It is estimated that in the US, 40 percent of bottled water is tap water. (See, Jared Blumenfeld, Susan Leal The real cost of bottled water, San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 2007)

In developing countries Coca-Cola has contributed to the depletion of ground water to detriment of local communities:

"Communities across India living around Coca-Cola's bottling plants are experiencing severe water shortages, directly as a result of Coca-Cola's massive extraction of water from the common groundwater resource. The wells have run dry and the hand water pumps do not work any more. Studies, including one by the Central Ground Water Board in India, have confirmed the significant depletion of the water table.

When the water is extracted from the common groundwater resource by digging deeper, the water smells and tastes strange. Coca-Cola has been indiscriminately discharging its waste water into the fields around its plant and sometimes into rivers, including the Ganges, in the area. The result has been that the groundwater has been polluted as well as the soil. Public health authorities have posted signs around wells and hand pumps advising the community that the water is unfit for human consumption....

Tests conducted by a variety of agencies, including the government of India, confirmed that Coca-Cola products contained high levels of pesticides, and as a result, the Parliament of India has banned the sale of Coca-Cola in its cafeteria. However, Coca-Cola not only continues to sell drinks laced with poisons in India (that could never be sold in the US and EU), it is also introducing new products in the Indian market. And as if selling drinks with DDT and other pesticides to Indians was not enough, one of Coca-Cola's latest bottling facilities to open in India, in Ballia, is located in an area with a severe contamination of arsenic in its groundwater.(India Resource Center, Coca-Cola Crisis in India, undated)

In developing countries, the hikes in fuel prices have increased the costs of boiling tap water by households, which in turn favors the privatization of water resources.

In the more advanced phase of water privatization, the actual ownership of lakes and rivers by private corporations is contemplated. Mesopotamia was not only invaded for its extensive oil resources, the Valley of the two rivers (Tigris and Euphrates) has extensive water reserves.

Concluding Remarks

We are dealing with a complex and centralized constellation of economic power, where the instruments of market manipulation, have a direct bearing on the lives of millions of people.

The provision of food, water, fuel are determined outside the confines of national economies, beyond the reach of national government policy. The price hikes of these three essential commodities constitute an instrument of "economic warfare", carried out through the "free market" on the futures and options exchanges.

These hikes in the prices of food, water and fuel are contributing in a very real sense to "eliminating the poor" through "starvation deaths".

The sugar coated bullets of the "free market" kill our children. The act to kill is instrumented in a detached fashion through computer program trading on the commodity exchanges, where the global prices of rice, wheat and corn are decided upon.

'The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future'

President Richard Nixon at the outset of his term in office asserted "his belief that overpopulation gravely threatens world peace and stability." Henry Kissinger, who at the time was Nixon's National Security adviser, directed various agencies of government to jointly undertake “a study of the impact of world population growth on U.S. security and overseas interests.”

In March 1970, the U.S. Congress set up a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. (See Center for Research on Population and Security). The Commission was no ordinary Task Force. It integrated representatives from USAID, the State Department and the Department of Agriculture with CIA and Pentagon officials. Its objective was not to assist developing countries but rather to curb World population with a view to serving US strategic and national security interests. The Commission also viewed population control as a means to ensuring a stable and secure environment for US investors as well as gaining control over developing countries' mineral and petroleum resources.

This Commission completed its work in December 10, 1974 and circulated a classified document entitled ational Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests" to "designated Secretaries and Agency heads for their review and comments." In November 1975, the report and its recommendations were endorsed by President Gerald Ford

Kissinger had indeed intimated in the context of the National Security Study Memorandum 200 that the recurrence of famines, disease and war could constitute a de facto instrument of population control.

Although the NSSM 200 report did not assign, for obvious reasons, an explicit policy role to famine formation, it nonetheless intimated that the occurrence of famines could, under certain circumstances, provide a de facto solution to overpopulation:

Accordingly, those countries where large-scale hunger and malnutrition are already present face the bleak prospect of little, if any, improvement in the food intake in the years ahead barring a major foreign financial food aid program, more rapid expansion of domestic food production, reduced population growth or some combination of all three. Worse yet, a series of crop disasters could transform some of them into classic Malthusian cases with famines involving millions of people.

While foreign assistance probably will continue to be forthcoming to meet short-term emergency situations like the threat of mass starvation, it is more questionable whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.

Reduced population growth rates clearly could bring significant relief over the longer term.....

In the extreme cases where population pressures lead to endemic famine, food riots, and breakdown of social order, those conditions are scarcely conducive to systematic exploration for mineral deposits or the long-term investments required for their exploitation. Short of famine, unless some minimum of popular aspirations for material improvement can be satisfied, and unless the terms of access and exploitation persuade governments and peoples that this aspect of the international economic order has "something in it for them," concessions to foreign companies are likely to be expropriated or subjected to arbitrary intervention. Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized. Although population pressure is obviously not the only factor involved, these types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth.

(1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests". (emphasis added)

The report concludes with a couple of key questions pertaining to the role of food as an instrument of national power, which could be used in the pursuit of US strategic interests.

- "On what basis should such food resources then be provided? Would food be considered an instrument of national power? Will we be forced to make choices as to whom we can reasonably assist, and if so, should population efforts be a criterion for such assistance?

- Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?" (Ibid, emphasis added)

In the words of Henry Kissinger: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people."

© 2008 Copyright Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research

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